WHITE COCKADES
An Incident of the "Forty-Five"
BY
EDWARD IRENÆUS STEVENSON
AUTHOR OF "THE GOLDEN MOON," ETC.
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1887
COPYRIGHT, 1887, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
TROW'S
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY,
NEW YORK.
TO
CLINTON BOWEN FISK, JR.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I. PAGE
IN A HIGHLAND GLADE, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
CHAPTER II.
A STORY AND A SHELTER, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
CHAPTER III.
"IN THE KING'S NAME," . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
CHAPTER IV.
"PUSS IN THE CORNER," . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
CHAPTER V.
IN WHICH CAPTAIN JERMAIN'S MEMORY IS USEFUL, . . . . . . . . . . . 66
CHAPTER VI.
A DESPERATE SHIFT, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
CHAPTER VII.
PRISONER AND SENTRY, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
CHAPTER VIII.
MEETING--FLIGHT, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140
CHAPTER IX.
COLONEL DANFORTH, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
CHAPTER X.
ALL FOR HIM, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184
CHAPTER XI.
UNDER THE OAK, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202
CHAPTER XII.
L'ENVOI, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213
WHITE COCKADES
AN INCIDENT OF THE "FORTY-FIVE"
CHAPTER I.
IN A HIGHLAND GLADE.
Just as the brilliancy of a singularly clear July afternoon, in the
year above named, was diminishing into that clear, white light which,
in as high a Scotch latitude as Loch Arkaig, lasts long past actual
sunset, Andrew Boyd, a Highland lad of sixteen, was putting the
finishing strokes to the notch in the trunk of a good-sized oak he
was felling. Its thick foliage waved rather mournfully, as if in
expectancy of near doom, over the boy's head. That oak had engaged
Andrew's attention pretty much all the afternoon. He was glad to be so
well on toward his work's close.
Around the young wood-cutter soughed the dense forest. It clothed the
mountain side, straight from the margin of the loch below. Andrew's
blows rang quick and true against the trunk. His springy back, his
well-developed legs and arms, came handsomely into play. On the moss
lay his plaid and bonnet. The sweat dripped from his forehead, not
much cooled by the breeze that tossed his yellow hair and the folds of
his kilt.
Young Boyd did not cut down oak-trees for a livelihood, though he just
now worked as if fortune had mapped a no less arduous career for him.
He was the only son of a wealthy landholder of the vicinity, a man of
English descent and English thrift. Andrew's grandfather came north
into Scotland from Shrewsbury, in a sort of angry freak after a local
quarrel. He bought and developed a valuable farm near Loch Arkaig, and
then suddenly died upon it, leaving the newly acquired estate to
Gilbert Boyd, the father of young Andrew. All of which had happened
some forty years before this tale's beginning.
One, two--one, two--rang the axe upon the tough wood which Andrew
wished for the boat he was building, down at the loch side. His
thoughts ran an accompaniment. We spare the reader their translation
from the Scotch dash in which they were couched, the result of
Andrew's schooling and intimacies round about him.
"There! Have at you again, old tree! How I wish you were a dragon, and
I some Saint George busy at carving you!" One, two--one, two--quoth
the axe, approvingly. "No, I don't! Away with any wish that meddles
with saint or man that the Lowlanders love!" One, two--one, two--assented
the axe. "Better wish that you were the little English King George
himself! and I a stout headsman, ready to knock his crown off, head
and all!"
The chopper's brows knit. His eyes flashed at a notion that struck
a specially sensitive chord. "Ah, you stockish trunk, if you only
were George, the Dutchman! Tyrant! Monster! Will you withdraw your
troops from our harried counties? Will you end now, at once, your
bloodthirsty hunt for the Prince?--God bless him! Will you empty out
that horrid Tower, full of our noble gentlemen and lords who fought
for the Lost Cause? Will you pardon my father's friend, the Earl of
Arkaig, and send him home straightway to us? What, you won't? Take
that, then!--and that!"
Here the axe-strokes descended with such vim and amid such a meteoric
shower of chips that no clear-headed listener could entertain for a
moment doubt as to hot-headed young Boyd's politics. The oak sighed,
and rather unexpectedly crackled and snapped, and came crashing down
most magnificently.
But halloa! At the instant that its mighty top smashed into the
underbrush and saplings, a single sharp, piercing cry of pain and
terror rang out above the crackle and splinterings.
Andrew dropped the axe. He rested rigid as stone, open-mouthed, in
sudden alarm and consternation. "What!" he exclaimed. "Great Heaven!
Can it be that--that a human creature--a man--was hid in the thicket,
and that when the oak fell----"
"Help! help! for the love of mercy!" The appeal, fainter than the
first cry, rose from the densest crush of the shattered oak branches.
There could be no mistake. Some one _had_ been slinking in the
bushes near young Boyd; possibly a Hanoverian spy! Through his own
unaccountable carelessness the unseen person had allowed himself to be
suddenly trapped by the boughs of the falling tree. He was pinned in a
torturing, if not a fatal trap.
Andrew's sharp eyes could not penetrate the barricade of dark green.
"Hi, there! Halloa!" he shouted. "Are ye under the oak? What has
befallen ye, man, or whatever ye be?"
No answer. To catch up his axe and plunge boldly into the tangle was
his next impulse. He hewed and trampled a path toward the centre of
the felled tree, which had been young but very vigorous and leafy. No
trace of any unusual object imprisoned beneath the knitted boughs, no
new cry for help guided him.
He began to doubt whether to press to right or left, or to go round
about and continue his examination from another point of the oak's
circumference, when a low but distinct groan spurred him to more
active work in the same direction. Forcing aside the strong branches
by his knees, he caught sight of a dark object just beyond. He next
discerned a cloth garment, covering a man's back. The yet invisible
wearer had been all this time in a faint, and was now able to betray
but small sign of interest in his own deliverance.
"This way, this way," Andrew heard him moan, as if articulating with
real anguish; "I am hurt badly, I fear. I cannot stir."
The accent, not so Scotch as Andrew's, seemed gentle. The mysterious
interloper might then be some well-bred prowler. Andrew thrust away
the last intervening twigs. There lay on the turf a man, at full
length, and face downward, with one arm and a part of his right
shoulder held as if in a vice by the oak's grasp. His well-turned neck
and figure implied to Andrew's hasty survey that he was young and
comely.
"Whatever you do, man, don't try to move!" exclaimed Andrew; "leave
your outgetting to me. I'll set you free in a trice."
He went to work cautiously but swiftly to do it.
"And my ankle is fast too"--came the smothered complaint. "Look--you
will see how--my leg--is held!"
Andrew looked. "'Twill be free speedily, sir!" he answered cheerfully,
already impressed by the fortitude of the tormented man. "Be but a bit
patient, sir. That's it; now you can roll to the left, please." He
employed axe and helve adroitly as he spoke. "Now, to the right; up,
up--that's it, sir. What a miracle your skull 'scaped the fork."
The victim rolled over, displaying the countenance of an entire
stranger, eight or ten years Andrew's senior, and with strikingly
handsome features. "Thank you, thank you, my good friend!" he gasped,
pulling himself to his feet; "that was the torture of a fiend, I
assure you! Your hand, one instant, please."
By dint of leaning on Andrew's arm, and after several battles with
successive tough boughs, in which the new-comer showed that he
possessed strength and dexterity, the two finally scrambled out of all
the labyrinth of foliage and into clear space. Andrew flung down the
axe and assisted his new acquaintance to a seat upon the prostrate
trunk.
"The next matter is to examine your hurts, sir!" Boyd exclaimed,
taking a sharp look at his dignified _protégé_. The latter returned
this scrutiny as keenly, however.
"I begin to suspect that such hurts amount to little or naught,"
returned the stranger, dropping Andrew's hand which he had held in
a grateful pressure. "I have nothing worse than a bruised shin, a
scraped shoulder and back, I fancy. Heaven be blessed, nothing is
broken in my anatomy!"
Andrew laughed, although he knelt down all the same and began a rigid
inspection of the bruises. He remarked how spare and muscular were
the stranger's legs and arms, as if from much exertion and little
food. His costume was odd: a faded Highland suit, rent and stained,
ill-fitting brogans, agape with holes cut by mountain flints; his
throat and face were surprisingly sunburnt, though his natural
complexion seemed to be fair. But what of his clothing or his tan? As
the man leaned against the prostrate trunk, with one leg boldly out
before the other for Andrew's care, there was something commanding,
fascinating to Boyd in his whole bearing. Andrew had not read
Shakespeare, but if he had he might well have recalled the lines in
"Coriolanus":
"----though thy tackle's torn
Thou showest a noble vessel."
While the hurried surgery progressed the object of it aided therein
with no small skill, venting now and then an ejaculation of pain. He
stealthily studied Andrew. It was a question which should first act on
the opinions shaped by this mutual caution. But in those gray blue
eyes sparkled a quizzical light that made Andrew smile, as he suddenly
observed it, when rising from his bowed attitude.
"Name for name, it must be, I see; and faction for faction, eh? Well,
I don't wonder that you and I have eyed each other askance. These be
days when honest men can ill be known as such. It would be strange,
too, if loyal subjects of Hanover, like you and your axe, should
not remember spies and renegades when you pluck strangers out of
tree-tops."
"You--you overheard my thoughts while I hewed!" returned Andrew, first
red, then pale. "I--I knew not that I ran them so heedlessly into
speech. Evil speech to be overheard, sir."
"Your tongue has a Lowland twang to it, whatever little to please a
Lowlander it spoke," said the stranger. "You are right my lad; what
you prattled there, by yourself, as you thought, was treason--with a
vengeance. Know you not that these mountains are filled with those who
would gladly tie your arms behind your back and gallop you off to
Neith jail, for half such sentiments. Or"--and here the voice became
tinged with a profound sadness, "or, have you been, young as you seem,
like myself, a defender of that most unlucky young soldier, my master,
Charles Stewart, who, a hunted refugee, with an army cut to pieces
and a realm lost, is skulking to-day in some corner of the country
with death at his heels and a price upon his head--instead of a
crown-royal."
Andrew drew himself back proudly and stared into his questioner's
face. "Sir," he exclaimed, "I see you _are_ a soldier! You may be a
Southerner as well. I care not. God save the Prince! I love him!
God defend him! So will say my father and every man and woman at
Windlestrae! I was too young--so they pleased to think--to fight at
Culloden Moor, and my father has just tided over a long sickness. But
for these things we had both been there--and dead, by now, 'tis very
likely."
The stranger fairly leaped from his resting-place. "Your hand, your
hand, young sir!" he demanded, his face suffused with color. "Rash as
you are loyal, let me press it! I, too, love the Prince, our master;
and I, too, hope yet to see him make a footstool of his enemies.
My name is Geoffry Armitage--Lord Armitage I am oftenest called.
Windlestrae, said you? Then I speak to one of those to whom I am sent
on an errand from which yonder villainous tree did its best to let me.
Are you Peter--no, Andrew Boyd, the son of Gilbert Boyd, who owns the
manor of Windlestrae?"
"I am, sir," replied Andrew, in deepening surprise: "this very nook of
the woodland we stand in belongs to my father and is within our farm.
The manor house and fields are but half-an-hour from this spot; below
the hill-foot yonder."
"Fortune favors me at last!" cried Lord Geoffry, seating himself again
on the trunk. "I bring a long message from the minister of Sheilar
Kirk, that I have to give to your father. I am a fugitive, as you may
have already guessed from the disparity between a title and my dress.
A fugitive? Yes, and one who has often thought that his life might
better have been left where the cause for which he would have laid it
down was lost--on Culloden Moor."
"Culloden!" exclaimed Andrew, "Oh! sir, were you truly in the fight?
Tell me more of it, I beseech you."
"Ay--for whatever in my own history is worth telling you or your
father begins with it!" the ruined nobleman replied in a melancholy
tone. He paused. Andrew heard him murmur, "Can I speak of _that_ day
so soon?" But he composed his utterance, and after a quick glance
about them looked up at Andrew, to begin his brief account of himself.